Medieval Norwich was the perfect place to hold the first of SAVE’s birthday events – a conference exploring how sensitive development can enhance historic towns and cities
We were delighted to be joined by a fantastic line-up of architects, academics, developers and heritage professionals at our 50th anniversary conference in Norwich last month, Building in Context: Delivering good growth in heritage locations.
Through presentations, panel discussions and walking tours we explored one of the most pressing challenges facing our historic towns and cities: how can new development enhance - and not destroy - the character that makes these places special?
Professor Yolande Barnes, chair of UCL’s Bartlett Real Estate Institute, gave the keynote address, The Competitive Advantage of Place in a Global Context: Leveraging heritage and distinctiveness as drivers of city success and investment.
She said the formula for successful cities hasn’t changed since Jericho was founded in 9,000BC. “All the stuff we see in cities now was there – teaching, learning, inventing, eating, feasting, trading, playing, visiting, making, mating,” she said.
“Real, valuable, successful places are still fine-grain, varied, messy. Case study after case study shows the value is in the fine grain. Why the hell aren’t we building it as a matter of course?”
In a fascinating presentation ranging from detailed analysis of global finance to the Rolling Stones, she shared her demographic projections suggesting the number of homes vacated by an aging population could overtake demand for housing within the next two years, leading to a housing surplus by 2032.
The UK’s housing crisis might then be more about quality and affordability than quantity, said Sunand Prasad, another of the speakers and a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), citing research from the Place Alliance that 74% of recently built homes are mediocre or poor.
He said new development in historic locations tended to be much higher quality than what goes up on greenfield sites. “Building in heritage contexts improves the quality of designs,” he said. “We are no good at building on green fields.”
Mr Prasad spoke of the “absolute exhilaration” of learning from old buildings. “Reuse can create a thrill as great as you get from creating an extraordinary new structure.”
He told the story of Snape Maltings in Suffolk which had recently closed when composer Benjamin Britten suggested converting it into a concert hall in 1967. “There was a real rebellion,” recalled Mr Prasad. Even people at Arup, the project’s engineers, were “appalled at the abandonment of scientific acoustic principles” in favour of using an “out-of-date structure”. Snape is now a world-renowned home of classical music and several of the site’s other industrial buildings have since been converted into visitor attractions and workshops.
Urban crisis
Many spoke of the challenge of viability, with construction costs up 50% post-Brexit and post-pandemic, a lack of public funding, low market values, under-resourced planning departments and a new building safety regime.
In his speech, Ben Derbyshire, another past president of the RIBA, said he had visited towns from Accrington to Exeter as a Historic England commissioner and found the common feature was “emptiness” – empty shops, low footfall. “It’s an urban crisis,” he warned. “There’s a serious problem which respective government policies have utterly failed so far to address. Yet everywhere we found local stakeholders who were incredibly positive about where they live.”
While there was no silver bullet, he said people-centred regeneration was key, as well as “filling empty spaces with activity that overcomes the first and most critical threat to historic infrastructure”.
Some of the problems are so big we can’t solve them nationally but there is an opportunity to solve them locally
GAIL MAYHEW, speaker and founder of the Stewardship Initiative
Ian Harrabin, MD of Complex Development Projects and chair of Historic Coventry Trust, has restored many buildings in inner city Midlands, from a grade I-listed medieval Charterhouse to the 1950s Coventry Evening Telegraph building. Twice this faced demolition and twice the proposed replacement towers proved unviable. Mr Harrabin was able to step in, converting it into a stunning mid-century boutique hotel. But he revealed the hotel’s final value was less than half of the cost of redeveloping it. “I had to find a way to cross-subsidise it,” he told the audience, adding that public-private partnership was key. “If you control the land and work with the council you can engineer a cross-subsidy across your site.”
Early engagement with the public was a mantra repeated by many speakers, including Emma Sweeney of World Monuments Fund and architects Stephanie Edwards of Urban Symbiosis – working on Swaffham town masterplan with a generation normally excluded from consultations – and Jim McKinney of Purcell – working in the Netherlands where the planning system deals with local concerns up front so developers have more certainty and aren’t left trying to game the system.
Closing the conference, Henrietta Billings, director of SAVE, spoke of the importance of street-based urbanism, and the over-riding need to put people first.
She said: “We know we can achieve outstanding, contextual, flexible design when developers, architects and LPAs work together. A ‘coalition of the willing’. We need political will, and we need to act now.”
- See the full line-up of speakers and other event information here
